Jefferson Bank considers moving headquarters to Broadway by Pearl

Jefferson Bank is working on plans to move its headquarters to 1.7 acres of land that its executives purchased last week on the booming Broadway corridor across from the Pearl.

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Jefferson Bank is working on plans to move its headquarters to 1.7 acres of land that its executives purchased last week on the booming Broadway corridor across from the Pearl.

“We’re very excited to be part of the growth in the downtown area and the Broadway corridor,” President Paul McSween said in an interview on Friday. “We’re growing rapidly and we’re going to have future space needs.”

The locally-based bank does not yet have specific plans for the site, at the northeast corner of Broadway and East Grayson Street, but McSween said it hopes to build something within the next five years. The building will likely have between 190,000 and 200,000 square feet of office space, with retail on the ground floor, he said.

Like many companies, Jefferson Bank wants to locate its headquarters in an urban area that is more attractive to talented young workers, McSween said. Its offices are currently on Loop 410 on the Northeast Side.

The company, which was founded in 1946 in San Antonio’s Jefferson neighborhood, has just under 400 employees, McSween said. Its total assets have increased 178 percent over the last 10 years to nearly $1.9 billion. A company forecast has determined that it will likely grow by between 150 and 200 employees over the next decade.

The new headquarters would be large enough to fulfill Jefferson Bank’s growth needs for the next 30 to 50 years, McSween said.

The Broadway property is kitty-corner from where local credit union Credit Human is building a 10-story headquarters with the help of $5.8 million in tax abatements and rebates from the city and $3 million in property tax abatements from the county.

Jefferson Bank will not apply for tax credits from the city for the project, McSween said.

“We like the site, and we think strategically it’s an economically vibrant area of San Antonio,” he said. “It’s just a place where we’d like to be in the future.”

McSween and three other Jefferson Bank executives purchased seven properties totaling nearly 1.7 acres last week comprising the entire block northeast of Broadway and East Grayson except for the building that houses the Still Golden Social House bar.

City Council voted in April to rezone the property from industrial to infill development allowing for commercial and high-rise office development, city records show. Local real estate firm Milam Real Estate Capital will partner with 1990 Broadway to develop the property, its managing director Plack Carr said on Thursday.

The lower Broadway corridor is booming. Along with Credit Human’s new headquarters, another mixed-use tower is planned two blocks north of where the Jefferson Bank executives bought their land. Developer GrayStreet Partner plans to build a 20-story hotel and office tower at the crossing of Broadway and Newell Avenue.

Alamo Colleges is building a new headquarters one block east of Broadway, at the northeast corner of Alamo and Josephine streets, and GrayStreet plans to redevelop 23 acres on the east side of the thoroughfare into a giant mixed-use community with hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space and retail.

Meanwhile, the city is using $42 million from the most recent bond package to transform Broadway into a landscaped boulevard that is more friendly to cyclists and pedestrians, with fewer lanes for cars.

Richard Webner is the real estate reporter for the Express-News. He moved to the beat in spring 2016, after spending about a year covering retail, hotels, tourism and manufacturing. Before coming to San Antonio, he was a business reporter at the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, and he had internships at the Chicago Tribune and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, as well as the Express-News in summer 2013. He earned a graduate degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and an undergraduate degree in History from Northwestern University. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio but has had the good fortune to live all over the United States.